by Greg Goode
However, for some investigators, the usual inquiry doesn’t resolve certain issues. These issues seem sticky and stubborn. I call them non-dual “sticking points.” Myself, I had two of them—free will and the subject/object distinction. These issues are usually related to well-ingrained metaphysical ideas that have a stronger than average reality effect for people. The particular issues may differ from one person to the next, but the reality effect can be so strong that it calls the entire path into question. For a student who’s at a sticking point, it may seem preferable to abandon the direct path altogether than to try to see through his or her metaphysical notions. Below I’ll outline some of the most common sticking points, along with the direct path’s keys to their dissolution.
The Non-existence of Other People
One potential sticking point is the idea that other people don’t exist. You can get this idea if you misinterpret the direct-path investigations. If you interpret global awareness as biological sentience or the personal mind, then the direct-path investigations may give you the idea that you’re alone in the universe. I’ve known a few people over the years who’ve had this reaction when pursuing the teachings on their own.
But when awareness is interpreted as global, not as the mind or anything personal, then this issue tends not to arise.
Speaking as someone who writes about direct-path investigation, I can tell you that I haven’t written an experiment that focuses on other people. Why not? Because I think of public media as a transmitter of non-dual pedagogy. I think about how the reader can use a book or a video to consume non-dual messages in any order. What if you encountered the investigation into people before the investigations into the world and the body? If you’re doing the contemplations and investigations on your own, without the guidance of a teacher, it can get scary if the topic of investigation is other people. I’ve known people who have experienced nihilistic, solipsistic, and depressive reactions when doing non-dual inquiries on their own. These unpleasant feelings can arise not only when studying the direct path but also in conjunction with other non-dual approaches. So in my own writings, I’ve chosen not to go into much detail about the status of persons. I’ve also placed a lot of emphasis on doing the Heart Opener before doing the various self-inquiry experiments. The Heart Opener makes the mind more subtle, which can lead to more fruitful inquiry. In the context of inquiry, the Heart Opener also functions as a convenient antidote to feelings of solitude and hopelessness.
Teachers of the direct path seem to be in agreement about this. I notice that books and videos about the direct path don’t feature investigations into the status of “other people.”63
You see others as you see yourself. So if you truly don’t see yourself as a person, a body, or a mind, then you won’t see another as a person, a body, or a mind either. You won’t feel alone, because you’ll be confident that your nature is the nature of all things. Your heart will open. You won’t feel cut off. You’ll have the warm and loving feeling that by your being awareness, everything is included and nothing is missing or denied. In my own case, direct-path investigations never caused me loneliness, alienation, or nihilism. Quite the contrary. Everything and all people came to feel as close as my heart, because all are of the same nature.
The Inability to See Other People’s Thoughts
This stumbling block is similar to the question of whether there are others, discussed above. But this one has a special concern. It’s related to a belief that, as awareness, one ought to be able to see the thoughts of others.
This belief comes from a confusion between awareness and the mind. Non-dualism says that there’s only one awareness, that all arisings are appearances to this one awareness, and that awareness is what we really are. Therefore, you may think, I should be able to see any thoughts that arise anywhere. But I clearly can’t see anyone else’s thoughts, so there must be something wrong with non-dualism.
Notice that “thoughts” and “others” make sense if we’re talking about minds, but not if we’re talking about awareness as described by the direct path.
This sticking point may come up most strongly while you’re investigating the mind, because it’s in that phase of the investigation that you move from seeing awareness as a mind to seeing awareness as the global clarity to which minds appear.
The feeling that you ought to be able to see others’ thoughts is based on some sticky assumptions:
a. That which sees thoughts is individual and belongs to a person.
b. There can be many of these seers.
c. That which is seen belongs to a person.
d. There are many of these objects (including persons and thoughts) available to be seen.
These assumptions were most forcefully articulated by the seventeenth-century dualist philosopher René Descartes, who characterized the mind as an indivisible, non-physical thinking thing inside the body—one mind per person. As a thinking thing, according to Descartes, the mind is able to know itself. It knows that it exists, but it’s prone to error when it tries to know anything else. In order to be sure about anything beyond our own mind, Descartes said, we need God’s help.
The concerns articulated by this stumbling are straight out of Descartes. Most students of non-dualism retain these assumptions even years into the non-dual path. Some non-dual teachings don’t even try to deconstruct these Cartesian assumptions.
The direct path deconstructs these assumptions in several ways. First, there’s the down-to-earth reply: if non-dual realization allowed the realizer to see others’ thoughts, then Shri Atmananda and other famous role models would have been virtually omniscient. But there’s no evidence of this whatsoever. So maybe omniscience isn’t such a sensible assumption to make. Maybe the assumption is off track.
Recall two of the dualistic assumptions involved in the belief that as awareness, you should be able to see other people’s thoughts:
a. That which sees thoughts is individual and belongs to a person.
b. There can be many of these seers.
These assumptions are based on the idea that the body contains the mind and the mind is what thoughts appear to. But in direct-path inquiry, you understand that awareness has no borders or edges, and awareness can’t be divided up on a one-per-person basis. You realize that the mind isn’t what appearances appear to, because the mind is itself an arising that appears to awareness. You realize that the mind is an appearance and that appearances can’t see anything.
There’s a deeper realization as well. You don’t even see “your own” thoughts! You’re not a person or a mind. As awareness, you’re not one of many minds. There’s simply no basis in your direct experience for dividing appearance into “mine” versus “others’” or “here” versus “there.” With this realization, the question of seeing “others’ thoughts” simply can’t arise.
The direct path has plenty of contemplations and experiments that allow you to realize that the body doesn’t enclose itself around awareness and that the mind isn’t the seer. As with many direct path–related issues, the most important discovery to make early on is that physicality isn’t objectively existent. Therefore it can’t function as a border or container. Also, because awareness is defined as “that which is appeared to,” it isn’t physical and can’t be compartmentalized or divided up. These discoveries make inquiry into the body and the mind much more natural and intuitive. The fruits of these discoveries include blissful freedom and openhearted love.
Objectifying Enlightenment
Another sticking point involves objectifying enlightenment. This happens when you see enlightenment as a property of a personal entity (or a “non-entity”). In such cases, you regard both the property and the (non)entity as existent objects. They seem to exist in a real way. Real enough, at least, so that you take enlightenment seriously and literally, either feeling inferior because you think you lack it or feeling superior because you think you have it.
Objectifying enlightenment can turn into a trap when
you take these ideas personally, as though they apply individually to you. You may have a deep feeling that you’re not enlightened. You may regard a non-duality teacher as possessing a quality that you feel you lack. Then you’ll want that quality for yourself. You might even suffer because you believe you lack a quality essential to happiness that others enjoy. This will throw you off the path, because you’ll be concentrating more on attaining a personal status than on contemplating the nature of reality.
If you believe that you are enlightened, this can be even more of a trap. You’ll feel “done.” You might not be open to deepening your understanding. And of course, feeling as though you’re enlightened represents a misunderstanding, a personal contraction, and a sense of separation. You’ll feel distinguished from others. You’ll feel elevated. You’ll take yourself seriously, as if you have a special connection to a profound truth, whereas other people have farther to go. These feelings and beliefs will cut you off from the possibility of realizing that everything is always-already free from entification and free from possession.
The direct path avoids the issue of treating enlightenment as something objective. This is because the direct path isn’t about a personal entity possessing a particular quality. There’s no such goal in the direct path. The direct path doesn’t personalize accomplishments. In fact, the very notions of “entity” and “quality” are inquired into and realized as nothing more than arisings—which is to say, awareness.
Even though the direct path doesn’t personalize spiritual attainment, it doesn’t object if you do the occasional “quality assurance” check to see whether your spiritual path is working for you. During these “QA checks,” you can revert back to a comfortable, everyday, non-spiritual vocabulary. Am I happier? More loving? More peaceful? Less confused? Personalization is a part of this vocabulary. If you feel that your path is making you unhappy, anxious, contracted, or selfish, then you should reassess your path. There’s no reason not to do these occasional sanity checks. But progress probably won’t be noticeable from minute to minute, day to day, or week to week. Give it more time.
In direct-path terms, none of this is a personal matter. Of course it usually starts out feeling like a personal matter, which is natural. This is because at the beginning of the path, your view about everything is personal. The direct path takes this beginning gestalt into account and works with it knowingly. As inquiry and other direct-path pursuits proceed, the gestalt opens up toward the non-personal clarity of awareness itself. For many years, I’ve noticed a very deep irony about the whole issue of non-dual investigation. This irony applies to many non-dual paths, not just the direct path. That is, for those doing investigations, the less they think about personal attainment, the closer they are to non-dual realization. (And of course that sentence personalizes the process way too much.)
Cause and Effect
Even if you’re comfortable with the direct path’s teaching that objects can be deconstructed into “arisings,” you may want to know the cause of these arisings. Does witnessing awareness cause an arising to appear? Does one arising cause another? Does an arising cause itself? How can an arising have no cause whatsoever?
The direct path approaches these questions by looking very closely to see whether there’s ever direct experience of a cause. Imagine the following arisings:
A memory-arising appears: an insult you received last week.
A feeling-arising appears: an unpleasant sense of indignation.
A belief-arising appears: (1) caused (2).
Arising 3 asserts a causal claim. What would make it a true claim? How would that work? Is there a hidden relation between arisings? Is there some sort of process that manipulates arisings behind the scenes? Because you can’t see this process, you may feel alienated because you can’t put your finger on the exact mechanism. This may seem to make you feel worse than you felt already after you remembered the insult, in (2)!
The investigation looks very closely at these arisings. In your direct experience, do you have any evidence of a cause happening between (1) and (2)? That is, even if (1) preceded (2), does that mean that (1) caused (2)? Where’s the direct evidence? That’s what we’re looking for to substantiate the idea of “cause.”
Maybe awareness itself caused (2). Is there any evidence of this? How does awareness cause an arising? Is it like a hand pushing flowers up from under the soil? Is there another arising coming between awareness and (2) that helped give birth to (2)? And even if there were, what makes that arising the cause of (2) rather than a preceding arising? Okay, then maybe (2) causes itself. Is there any evidence of (2) causing (2) to happen? Would that even make sense? Because if (2) were there to cause itself, it would already be present. And if it were present, then what was the cause of that arising? This could lead to a hopeless infinite regression.
But actually, no cause whatsoever is evident in your direct experience. When you realize this, cause and effect lose their grip on you as sticking points.
Investigating cause and effect provides an “extra added bonus,” as they say in the world of sales. It helps you deconstruct the idea of personal doership, which is its own sticking point for many people. After all, doership is a particular case of causality, in which you regard a person as the cause and a decision as the effect. According to do something is to cause it to happen. So if you realize that we never find cause or effect in our direct experience, then you usually realize that we can never find doership in our direct experience either.
Doership
Doership is a familiar issue to most investigators on non-dual paths. In fact some paths devote most of their teachings to this issue. In my own investigations, I contemplated doership for about a year. I was contemplating whether my true identity resided in the choosing function. I had already “seen through” a wide variety of other candidates for identity, and doership was the last holdout on my horizon. I really thought that my identity lay in being the chooser of alternatives and the doer of actions.
The direct path’s approach asks you to find the doer you think is there. So you look for a doer-entity in your direct experience. Can you find a doer anywhere? Yes, there are thoughts that propose doership and claim it, too. For me, there are feelings of pride and anguish at a job “I” did well or poorly. There are contractions in my chest and forehead when “I” am criticized for an action that “I” claim to have done.
But thoughts, feelings, and sensations are not a true doer. In fact, when you investigate them, you realize they are nothing more than spontaneous arisings appearing to witnessing awareness. Direct experience verifies that no thought can be a cause or an effect of another thought, since each one arises spontaneously and causelessly from witnessing awareness, the same as any other arising. So where would a doer be? This is what the investigation asks you to find in your direct experience. When you realize that no doer or chooser is found, the seeming reality of doership dissolves. It’s no longer a sticking point.
Memory
Memory is formally similar to causality. It’s another case in which we normally feel that there’s an unseen relationship between arisings.
Let’s take a close look at memory, as we did with causality. We can do this even without deconstructing time itself, which is more subtle and not often a sticking point. And after we deconstruct memory, the passage of time will seem a lot less real. Events won’t so strongly seem to be truly happening in an objective way.
So let’s say that there are two arisings, a past insult-arising (1) and a present memory-arising (2).
(1) The insult-arising that appeared last week
(2) The memory-arising that seems to refer to (1)
The direct path approaches memory by asking what makes (2) veridical. Let’s examine the relationship between (2) and (1). What makes (1) a true event? What proves that the event mentioned in (2) actually happened? What’s the link between (1) and (2) that verifies memory?
When (1) appeared, (2) hadn’t yet appeared. And when (2)
appears, (1) is no longer around. How can they be related? How can the supposed referential relationship between them be verified? The two arisings are never present together. They don’t touch each other. They don’t contain each other. Maybe the mind takes care of it. How would that happen? You may think that there’s a subconscious area of the mind where all this is kept straight. But what’s our direct evidence of such a region? What’s our direct evidence of a relationship between (1) and (2) residing in this region? Yes, there are belief-arisings that make claims about these kinds of mental structures. But aside from these belief-arisings, what’s our direct evidence?
When you deeply realize that there’s no direct justification for any of these beliefs about memory, the feeling of the reality of the past and present loses much of its reality effect. You feel a wonderful sense of freedom. And you don’t forget how to go to the store or pay your taxes! Those actions are also arisings that appear spontaneously to awareness. They need no extra managerial help from another arising!
The Coherence of the World
When so much of the physical, somatic, and mental world is brought under investigation, you might feel rebellious, as if too much is being deconstructed. You might want to admit that there’s something real after all that makes the world seem sensible. The world really seems coherent, and that ought to count for something! You might feel as if continuing on direct-path inquiry might bring on madness. So you ask: “Okay then, so why do arisings arise in just this way? Why don’t they seem totally random? Why don’t things seem like a case of ‘blooming, buzzing confusion,’ as psychologist William James once quipped?”
These are frequent and valid questions. This issue of coherence can be a sticking point for people who feel that the direct path is asking them to give it up. These people might rather reject the direct path than reject the very obvious coherence they seem to experience. The coherence question is similar to the classic question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” Sometimes non-dual teachers answer these questions with anthropomorphic statements, such as “Awareness wanted to know itself experientially.” But in the direct path, by the time someone is looking into mental phenomena, it’s too late for that kind of answer. It’s too late to take seriously an answer that attributes desires to awareness. This kind of answer personalizes awareness, making it seem too much like an individual mind.